I am wondering if any of you are in possession of a KitchenAid mixer in Candy Apple Red. Not Empire Red, but Candy Apple Red. My parents are considering buying one, but they can’t see it in person anywhere, and my mother’s feelings about the color red remind me of when Jess Loolu said her florist said she’d never met anyone with such a narrow definition of purple. (“Hm,” said my mom disapprovingly, looking at a picture of the mixer, “It looks like it might be more CHERRY.”)

Adding to the problem is this sort of thing:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Notice that three of those are supposedly Empire Red and one is supposedly Candy Apple Red, but I see four different shades of red.

So I have come up with an idea, and it is an idea that will be a huge pain in the butt for someone. I think someone who has a Candy Apple Red KitchenAid mixer should go to a store that has paint chips, get all the red ones from several different major brands of paint, bring them home, hold them up to the mixer, and tell us WHICH paint colors from WHICH brands are closest to representing the color. In fact, maybe EVERYONE with a colored KitchenAid mixer should do this, and we can build a whole DIRECTORY of KitchenAid mixers compared to ALL the different brands and shades of paint! …Well, for now maybe just the Candy Apple Red.

Update: My mom found the comments very helpful, enough to make her willing to risk ordering one. So SWISTLE will do the paint-chip task, for the benefit of future shoppers!

I have a product to heartily and door-handle-clutchingly recommend: reflective magnetic student driver signs.

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

These have SIGNIFICANTLY improved my feelings about sitting in the passenger seat while Rob drives. I feel like everyone around us is FOREWARNED (or REARWARNED or SIDEWARNED, as the case may be). And people DO give us more space. When I was researching student driver signs online, I found a BUNCH of people saying no, don’t use signs because there are people who will target student drivers and make things difficult for them: honking and zooming nearby to try to scare them, cutting them off, yelling taunts, etc. I don’t know what kind of gross pinehole would do such a thing, but so far we haven’t encountered ANYONE like that. So far what it seems to be doing is making other people more willing to let Rob merge, more tolerant of him going the speed limit or waiting too long to make a turn, more tolerant of his occasional slight weaving or over-braking or whatever. I am thinking I will leave the signs on even when it is ME driving.

Originally I’d made signs by using the largest font that would fit on a piece of printer paper, and then gluing that to cardboard:

Those blocked too much of the window, were hard to wedge into place, and weren’t much good at night. I still do have one of those in the front window on the passenger side, but then I use the magnets on the driver door, the front passenger door, and the back of the car. If the car looks dirty, I first take a half-wet washcloth and wipe/dry where I want to put the magnet. When we’re done driving for the day, I take them off the car and put them in a nice flat stack on the dining room table, which is where I keep everything I don’t know where else to put it.

Several reviews mentioned that the magnets can come flying off at high speeds, but we’ve done a couple hours’ worth of highway driving by now (did you mistake my new white hairs for highlights?) and haven’t lost one yet. It’s nice to be braced for it, though: I went into the purchase thinking, “Well, they’re about $6 each, and if we DO lose one from time to time, they’re STILL worth it as long as they’re not dropping off every time we go driving.” And they haven’t dropped off at all yet, so that’s good. If one did, I would have an order for more signs placed within microseconds.

Our internet provider has been down since the day before Thanksgiving, so I am writing this in a word processing document like a SAVAGE. I can just picture all the ministers and bloggers across the region churning this experience into sermons/posts about how this outage was A Reminder to really BE THERE for Thanksgiving and to Reflect on what was Really Important, to “turn off,” as it were, and to “tune in” to our families and to gratitude. But to me (and to all the rest of us writing about what a blessing it was, I suspect), it was a giant pain. I hadn’t yet chosen a Brussels sprouts recipe from the Thanksgiving Vegetable Side Dishes comments section, so I had to go through deleted emails looking for them (LIKE A SAVAGE). Also, I like seeing people’s Thanksgiving pictures on Facebook. Also, I wanted to come to my computer during cooking breaks to write on Twitter things like how much I love thinking of so many of us cooking all at the same time, or about how Thanksgiving was the first official day for putting whipped cream on coffee (not that every day can’t be Thanksgiving in our hearts and coffee cups). Also, there are online deals and I am missing them LEFT AND RIGHT. And perhaps most importantly of all, I couldn’t log in to Webkinz World and get my special Thanksgiving Box.

Several people recommended Ina Garten’s recipe for Brussels sprouts, so I tried that. And it was pretty good! Paul, with the wonder of Thanksgiving in his eyes: “I ate one and I didn’t die!” But I will likely never make them again because of the SMELL, which I would in fact call a STENCH or REEK. There were half a dozen foods cooking, and Brussels sprouts was the only smell we could smell. It DOMINATED the smell of Thanksgiving. Thursday night as we were going to bed, I complained to Paul that I reeked of Brussels sprouts, and he said gallantly that he could only smell the flowery smell of my hair. “But for real, you can…I mean, thank you, Paul….but for real, you CAN smell it, right? It isn’t just on the inside of my nostrils?” The morning after Thanksgiving, I could still smell it. Friday afternoon, coming in from a trip to the mailbox, I could still smell it. I am reminded of broccoli, one of the few vegetables I genuinely like, and the way it makes me hate the smell of my house and skin for the whole day after I cook it.

[THE INTERNET IS BACK AT LAST]

This weekend I sleepwalked into a shower. The first awareness I had was thinking I shouldn’t just stand in the shower wasting water like this, but I was sooooo tired. I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether I’d already washed my hair or not. While drying off, I saw the clock and gradually figured out what the major issue was.

When I was a pre-teen, I used to take all the sheets and blankets off my bed, carry them somewhere else in the dark house (living room, kitchen), come back to my room, and wake up. THAT was discouraging. These days I’m more likely to wake up in the living room, or wearing different pajamas. As I get older, it’s giving me an unpleasant glimpse of what senility might be like: How did I get here? What happened? Did I do anything…ELSE?

William (who sometimes sleepwalks and often sleeptalks) says he read it was due to insufficient melatonin, so I took a melatonin last night, but it just gave me a very vivid dream in which an encounter with a man was getting increasingly dangerous. Sleepwalking can be caused by stress/anxiety, so I’m blaming it on my poor decision to read just a FEW comments on an article about a rape report. I only read FOUR comments! How could such a small sample make me want to give up on all humankind? I know what will fix it: taking a shower in the middle of the night.

I made a total mess of an Old Navy order. Just messed up at every turn, so that I ended up paying shipping on a single item, then hours later realizing I never even checked for other colors and placing a second order that, if I’d combined it with that single item, would have eliminated the need to pay shipping; then realizing too late that maybe I could have CANCELED the first order BEFORE placing the second order; then the very next morning there was a better coupon than when I ordered.

Well. This is one of those situations that is probably worth ten dollars just for the excellent practice Letting Insignificant Stuff Go. Let’s say I spent even TWENTY DOLLARS more than I had to, it’s still fine. I will get the items I want (THE LIGHTWEIGHT HOODIE. I love it SO MUCH), and I would rather HAVE the items than NOT have them because I couldn’t make myself get over the $7 shipping mistake and the “not being psychic and knowing the prices would be lower the next day” mistake. (This almost happened. I almost didn’t place the second order, because of the shipping I’d ALREADY PAID AND COULDN’T GET BACK. Because if I didn’t place the second order, then it still made sense that I’d had to pay shipping for the first one. That is what passes for LOGIC around here.) AND ALSO: I see that the color I wanted most is out of stock this morning in my size, so if I HAD waited, I would have MISSED it.

And not even two weeks ago I was KICKING myself for not ordering more of the lightweight hoodies while I still could, and wondering if maybe I could find them on eBay, and if you had said to me, “Well, actually I have two of them, brand new, in your size, but you’ll have to pay $5 each more than you paid for your first one…,” I would have said “GIVE THEM TO ME RIGHT NOW, WHO CARES ABOUT $10???” Having a couple colors inexplicably come back into stock in my size is GOOD news.

So. Everything is really FINE, and there is no need to compare “What could have been” to “What is,” especially when “What is” is NOT VERY MUCH WORSE THAN “What could have been.” We are not talking here about a tragically-missed opportunity for love or happiness, we are talking about ACCIDENTALLY PAYING A LITTLE MORE THAN I HAD TO FOR SOME CLOTHING.

The trees that were bothering the neighbors are COMING DOWN! It is quite exciting to watch. I have been running around inside the house like a hamster in a cage, looking out first one window and then another. Side note: when I went over to let the neighbor know when the tree guys were coming, she made a remark about how she was sorry to lose the shade. There are times when one just has to close one’s eyes very briefly.

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I know I have written about this before, but I am having trouble with pants for Rob. It started as soon as he left the boy sizes, which go 8, 10, 12, etc., up to as high as 20—and then suddenly it’s waist/inseam. Before, I could always buy pants ahead on clearance/sale, maybe $6-12 per pair. Now, who KNOWS what his waist/inseam will be, so I just have to wait and buy right after each growth spurt. I just paid $24 each for two pairs of pants and I’m feeling a little sick. And there’s no reason to think these will even work as handmedowns: the other boys could have totally different waist/inseam measurements! I am trying to be chill about this: this is not a weird amount of money to spend on clothes. But I’m also still checking Goodwill (and Target clearance) EVERY TIME, to see if I can build up his pants supply at a nicer price.

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We’re bringing Rob’s cello back to the store. It seems like so much fuss and hassle had to occur to find out it wasn’t a good fit for him—but I’m glad I did it, because I can picture this otherwise being one of those adulthood parent-blaming regrets where he’d imagine he would have been AWESOME at the cello IF ONLY his parents would have gone to a TINY bit of trouble to help him find out.

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I wish Thanksgiving were a couple weeks earlier. November 13th this year, for example. I feel like I can’t focus on Christmas until after Thanksgiving, but by the time Thanksgiving is over it feels like time to panic.